Part 6

There is our own Emerson, whose admiration for Carlyle was probably only outdone by Carlyle's admiration for him! "Self Realization," "The American Scholar," "Friendship," "Politics"--how many of his essays have become part and parcel of America's loftiest thought and action. The metallic acuteness of his personality was not of the kind with which you can become familiar, but its very aloofness holds our respect and devotion. The austerity of George Washington in public life can only be compared with the cold distance at which this philosopher holds us, and yet upon their pedestals we recognize them as men from whom the best in American character has derived nourishment. In every sentence of his every essay, we feel the soul at peace, the intellect enthroned, the power of will predominant.

A man without friends is a man without life, and I have but told you of some of my boon companions. Never to have shared in the fellowship of the great spirits who are preserved for us in books is to cut one's self off from the most rewarding of human relationships. The chums of our boyhood, our companions at college, too often drift away to distant parts, or diverge from us in pursuits other than our own; although remembrances of our times together are sacred and of sweet recalling, too often they are of the past and renewal forever impossible. The friends of our books, however, are forever with us, they cannot die, they cannot depart, they remain fresh and vigorous, hearty sojourners upon our road, forever willing to lend a hand over the rocks and bumpy places. Without disparaging those with whom I sit before the fire, and chat, and smoke, I must confess that I value equally with them the friends of eternal character that exist there in the book-case. They lighten the path of life; they are ready for converse when my spirit calls.

Go to the greatest books for your most enduring friends, but upon having formed their friendship do not leave them in the study, but carry them within your spirit to your business and the marts of men, and in holding their confidences burning in your heart you will find yourself a more thorough human being.

*CHAPTER IX*

*KEEPING UP WITH LIFE*

Reading is the key which admits us to the whole world of thought and fancy and imagination, to the company of saint and sage, of the wisest and wittiest at their wisest and wittiest moments. It enables us to see with the keenest eyes, to hear with the finest ears, and to listen to the sweetest voices of all time.

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

If in the minds of some readers this little book has helped to break down the futile distinctions and to show the real relation between the man who reads and the one who enjoys life, between the thinker and the man of action, it has done all that the author dared hope. Let us look upon our library not as an end in itself, but as a means to an end. It is a mistaken ambition to read as many books as possible within a year, or to attempt religiously to read the complete works of a number of authors. The man who buries himself in his library and exists only in the books therein is an unsocial, stagnant creature; but the one who reads as a means of attaining to a more productive life among his fellow men is the one who has gained the true riches of literature.

The world is a world for workers, not idlers. We live in America in the twentieth century, and we are of but little use to the general machinery if our minds are forever sojourning with the mediaeval knights or gossiping in the by-ways of London with Charles Lamb and his contemporaries. Literature for you and me who live, and toil, and hope to obtain joy in the doing of it, must be vivifying nourishment to apply to our living and toiling. Great books and all true education provide this nourishment or else they would not be worth the price of a comic supplement.

Poetry, fiction, philosophy and history are not alone for old maids and retired business men who desire comforting, amusing solace to while away the hours until the race is run, nor alone for college professors and writers whose business it is to read, abstract, and judge,--they are truly, have been, and always will be for the minds of men and women who need and use the spirit of them in their work, their play, their sorrows, and their joys.

When Francis Bacon wrote "Reading maketh a full man," he did not mean "full" to imply a great accumulation of facts and dry-as-dust learning. Bacon was a philosopher, scientist, essayist, of the first order in each, and yet a leading statesman in his age. His mind was "full" in that he had probably as had no other man in England absorbed all the literature and science of all the centuries that had preceded him; his was the fulness of the reservoir from which could be drawn an endless stream of resource with which to undertake new political enterprises, of strength to maintain his position and of philosophy in the face of losing it. He was a literary man in that he knew the literature of the world, a man of letters--he wrote masterpieces, a man of action--he virtually ruled Great Britain. This is the threefold thread of life that we may all have as our ambition,--the connoisseur, the creative artist, the productive worker.

After having considered the bearing the reading of books has upon life, let us consider the bearing that living has upon reading and writing. Elbert Hubbard carried out this thought in his little book upon William Morris, the English poet. Morris, as you may know, was a weaver, a blacksmith, a wood-carver, a painter, a dyer, a printer, a furniture manufacturer, a musician, and withal a great poet. Hubbard said: "William Morris thought literature should be the product of the ripened mind." We have looked at Bacon as one whose literary output must have been the product of a mind that had manfully grappled with worldly affairs, and here is a further list that the Roycrofter gives us: "Shakespeare was a theatre manager, Milton a secretary, Bobbie Burns a farmer, Lamb a bookkeeper, Wordsworth a Government employee, Emerson a lecturer, Hawthorne a custom-house inspector, and Whitman a clerk."

The professional man of letters, except in rather rare instances, is by no means the man who erects the most enduring literary monuments. Literature must come from elemental life to have the true relationship to the affairs of men. We could increase Elbert Hubbard's list to an almost indefinite length--the author of the Gettysburg address had the weight of a nation upon his shoulders, Thoreau was more interested in observing the changing seasons than he was in writing books, Tolstoy was a soldier, an economist and farmer, Balzac an unsuccessful publisher, Bunyan a preacher, Pepys a high government official, Oliver Wendell Holmes a doctor, and countless novelists and poets of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries hard-working, hard-driven newspaper men.

Leisure does not make great literature,--all that is effective must come from interior or exterior experiences, and acute observations. The most effectual reading is that which is done in the light of personal experience, with one's eye upon unliterary activity. There is an endless chain, of which the links are the subject, the artist, the reader and his life as reflected by the author's treatment. To live in a world of books and to have as their profession the spinning of other volumes is the life of too many of our writers. On the other side of the shield, we of course see readers whose lives are entirely absorbed in the volumes they read without an outlet to the practical activities of existence. How tiresome it is to have a bustling man or woman tell us that they have not the time or that they are not literary enough to read great books. They of course, being good Americans, have plenty of time to go through stacks of worthless novels, and absorb a half dozen continuous serial stories in our monthly magazines. I say it is tiresome, and it is foolish, as with a moment's thought we can realize that books are essentially for the man or woman who is most deeply immersed in life.

Break down the barrier between literature and life?--there is none! I have a certain friend who has more to do within the twenty-four hours of the day than has anyone else I know. Politics, municipal corporations, railroads--these are apparently his life--absorbed in men and affairs. And yet if I run across a book that especially appeals to me, I go to him and ask his ideas upon it. He has probably read it and with his greater experience in the actual turmoil of living than I have had, he can enlighten me with a dozen new points of view upon the book under consideration. He interprets it in the light of his experience, as the author had written in the light of his.

It was said that during President Wilson's first winter in the White House, society in Washington was much exercised as to how he passed his evenings. It later developed that those evenings in which he was not absorbed in official business were spent in reading poetry, preferably Wordsworth, to his family. Washington stood amazed! Perhaps there is no truth in this story, but the ingredients are certainly there, which, if brought into conjunction, would make a true yarn. The active helmsman of the ship of state, with innumerable matters weighing upon him, seeking wisdom and spiritual fibre from a great poet; Washington society, without much to do, yet frightfully busy, amazed at his wasting or dreamily passing his hours of possible recreation!

Many another great public man has well appreciated that books are not for the closet but for life. Theodore Roosevelt is the apostle of strenuosity, statesman, ranchman, hunter, and yet a writer upon a wide range of subjects and an omnivorous reader. The plays of Shakespeare were the school books and college education of our rail splitter, Abraham Lincoln. A great English liberal, Charles James Fox, would charm the House of Commons for hours with his oratory, go to Brooks' and lose a fortune at cards, and then home to his bed to read the Plays of Euripides,--probably to absorb wisdom and courage for his thinking and gaming upon the following evening. Of the men and women to whom books mean life, we could go on with our list indefinitely, not only through the ranks of kings and queens, soldiers and statesmen, financiers and merchants, but sea captains, mechanics, farmers, clerks, and coal miners. In every walk of life we find the true philosophers, the true adepts in the art of living, seeking sustenance from the printed page.

Go into a public library, and study the faces of those who are reading there--ambition, inspiration, delight will be expressed by those who have found _the open door_, the way to riches and plenty. Observe the homes of your acquaintances! Cicero said that books are the soul of a room, and we may expand this epigram in saying that the use of books in a family brings all the members into a communion with each other, creating an atmosphere far removed from that of the home in which books are infrequent sojourners.

Oh no, it is not the professed gentleman of literature with the pedantic knowledge and bookish phraseology, but the men and women who seek explanation of and relief from sorrow, stimulus to higher attainment, pleasure that mellows activity, to whom the authors are truly the path of life. Those whom you see on the elevated trains reading Shakespeare, the ranchman with his pocket edition of Dickens, the country doctor who hates to buy an automobile as when driving his old buggy he could read his Boswell upon his round of visits,--they are the ones to whom the poet can truly say,

You will hardly know who I am, or what I mean; But I will be health to you nevertheless, And filter and fibre your blood.

You need never be afraid of becoming intellectual. To be sure it is somewhat the fashion in America to think that a man who reads Meredith should be a college professor or the editor of a book review--but this is only a fashion and held to by the most stupid. It is smart to laugh at good books and "culture," but it is the same sort of smartness at which all Europe has been sensibly sneering for a century. Reading should not be a profession; those that make it such invariably become world weary, book weary, at sea in an ocean in which life is necessarily a more vital thing than they are able to swallow. Do not give your life over to your library, but make of it an electric battery with which to vivify life. It can be done, and is done by the great and the little, the sorrowful and the joyful, the leading warriors in the battle for civilized progress.

Call upon the supreme minds of past ages to support you in the strife of this and they will prove stalwart, faithful legions. Read as is your need and inclination; not as a duty, not as a feat, but as an acknowledgment that you are glad to win the best and most helpful of friends. Aristotle said that all men desire knowledge. If knowledge means deeper human sympathy, a more profound enlightenment, a richer, happier, more productive life, let each one of us admit that the attainment of knowledge is in truth our endeavor. Let us try the experiment of finding this knowledge in the volumes of the deepest, the most intensive livers.

Make the book you read to-day play a part in the world of to-morrow, and you will rise above the reader in the closet who carps and criticizes, thus cutting himself off from the work of men. You will disprove all statements about the lack of practicability of education, the other-worldiness of books.

* * * * *

There was a boy who wandered out along an unknown highway into a far country. The way seemed sombre, foreign and meaningless. His questions were unanswered, his desires unsatisfied; there seemed no by-paths into which he could turn in the hope of finding a solace or a reason for his journey.

A never-ending vista without rhyme or reason lay before him of flat, uninteresting solitudes, only broken by dark pits or rugged obstructions which he had either to circle about or climb over or under. They always annoyed and provoked him, as there seemed no set plan for meeting such difficulties, no apparent purpose in wandering on. He knew, however, that there was no turning back, he had to stagger, and stumble, and plod forward, ever forward.

It was the way of life, and it was a meaningless road, a disappointing journey undertaken with great expectations.

After a deal of suffering, impatience and profound discouragement, he came upon a great Palace standing in his way. It was the first that he had ever seen, and he wondered at it.

With hesitancy he determined to walk about it and to follow the beaten road, uninteresting but familiar, which he felt must stretch beyond. He spied, however, a small door at the side of the great barred gate and he determined to enter and to see what could be found within. The panel yielded to his timorous push, and he found himself in a mighty hall where there were wondrous things!

Many another wanderer had already arrived, and many others were to follow,--there was a happiness, a purpose, a vitality in life that had been sadly lacking upon the road of his journeying. Wisdom, riches, the answers to his questions, the reasons for his arduous pilgrimage lay before him. He grasped them and was content.

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